TOM FRANCIS
REGRETS THIS ALREADY

Woo-EEE-Ooh-AAA!

I knew BeBot – a beatific tuxedo’d robot for the iPhone who sings at your touch – was awesome. I didn’t realise he was awesome.

Via, of course, Waxy.

The Team Fortress 2 Experience

Needle Exchange

Skulch.

Schlunk.

Whunk.

Thunk.

Sklunch.

Ptow.

Nom.

Fwoosh.

Snick.

I appear to have been punctured.

Much as I suck with it, I’m still liking The Huntsman.

The Prime Minister Of Sinister

The new unlock system -whereby players are awarded a random weapon they may or may not already have every few hours – is terrible. I love it. Because very suddenly, it awarded me the Huntsman. I certainly lust more fiercely after some of the Spy unlocks, but the bow and arrow is probably the newest thing in this update. I punctured a few Scouts on Arena: Sawmill before a friendly Pyro happened to run past flaming wildly, and caught my arrow on fire. Ace! I shot a Scout with it. Ace! He caught light. Ace! He burned to death. Ace!

The Huntsman taunt involves thrusting an arrow rather nastily upside an imaginary victim’s guts. I plan to engineer a situation in which this victim is not imaginary.

It really grates not being able to work my way towards the unlocks I want, though. It undermines the main driving force unlocks bring to the game: progression. Since it came up in the comments to the last post, my ideal system would let players pick an unlock to work towards, and tell them how many points they have to score to earn it – 500 for the Huntsman, say. Then there’d be a little toggleable bar on the HUD showing their cumulative progress towards achieving it.

The sneaky Spy buffs in this update make him worth spamming even without the new unlocks: dressing as an enemy Spy, now that you appear to be wearing a mask, genuinely fools most players right now. It won’t last to that extent, but it’s nice that only one of his disguises is truly fallible now. Even their health is beyond suspicion, now: he appears as injured as the person he’s pretending to be, so no more blasting team-mates for being conspicuously half-dead.

I’m looking forward to using enemy teleporters, though I’d still love an unlock that let me use them in reverse: jaunt from the exit to the entrance. Speaking of which, Doctor Disaster’s Spurious Sentry Spraypaint is still better than anything Valve came up with for the Spy.

It is a source of sadness to me that the Spy’s killing joke – his fatal taunt animation – is the swishy knife fencing one. I’d suggested his flicked cigarette should permanently ignite anyone it hits, because it just seems classier. It is a source of some glee, though, that his murderous fencing can be performed invisibly: I taunt-stabbed a Sentry, then its Engineer, without being revealed.

This, too, makes me beam. Taunt a few times with your disguise kit out.

It’s early to judge, but I’ve taken a powerful enough dislike to Pipeline that I’m actively avoiding servers running it. It seems to have some uncircumnavigable chokepoints and the open areas don’t inspire me somehow.

Arena, on the other hand, is not as hateful as I remember. I can still never forgive a system that asks anyone, ever, to sit out a round. But it’s only happened once, and so far I’m really liking the two new maps: Sawmill and Nucleus. As I said before Arena first revealed itself to be terrible, the map format fundamentally appeals to me: last man standing deathmatch, with a single time-release capture point to bring things to a head if they drag on. The server we played on at lunch permitted teams of at least 11, so no whole team had to sit out, but individual players still did, and the next time that’s me, my renewed tolerance for this nonsense will end.

Red Pyro Lost Dracula Again, Smells Depressed

Checking now, it doesn’t look like you can read the text of this wall at the start of Meet The Spy in the early YouTube leak:

Which makes me wonder if they added one of these afterwards:

Lots more fun ones in there – stringing them together is the Team Fortress 2 equivalent of fridge magnet poetry.

Spoiler for the video: one of the characters in it turns out to be a Spy in disguise all along!

Scenes From Last Night’s Apocalypse

Six of us piled into Killing Floor. There were no survivors.

Martin is in trouble. This was our first game, before we’d actually found a stable server or invited anyone else to join. We survived the pistol round, albeit with no ammo, then met variously sticky ends out in the dark of the fields. Lesson learned: stay near the light.

The B is in trouble. He actually went on to survive this horror and complete the wave, which meant Martin and I – long since dead – were resurrected for the next.

The B is, once again, in trouble. Being the last man left alive is similar in pressure to Counter-Strike – you know your team are watching you in spectator mode – but more so, since their lives and the continuation of the game hinge on your survival.

This is a type of zombie that seems to have ripped off one of its arms and stitched it to the other, creating a weird sort of double-hand, between which he’s wedged a large blade. Or, you could just hold it.

CloakRaider likes knives. I didn’t realise he, Hypnotoad and Macca had joined us and were watching in spectator mode, until the wave ended and they were able to spawn in the game. We suddenly started doing a lot better with six guns firing.

“Dude, dude, dude, wait up, I wanna show you something.” After most of us had died, Hypnotoad was chased by this thing all around the map, ammoless, about three times, trying to lead him to the other remaining survivor to help.

It doesn’t hold them forever. A lot of good hole-up spots, though, have two main entrances. Welding one shut to deal with the influx from the other works well. It also leads to a tense moment when the first stream is exhausted, and all the remaining specimens are banging against the door, and you have to just wait ten seconds or so for them to breach it before everyone opens fire.

I was dead by this stage, almost certainly from a Flesh Pound.

Far too early to use a grenade, but there were just so many of them, in so small a space.

Oh God Flesh Pound. Flesh Pounds get angry when you shoot them, which makes them ultra-fast. They’re already ultra-deadly and ultra-tough, so this can rapidly ruin your day. I think the idea is for everyone to hold their fire until they’ve all got their main weapons out and fully loaded, then unleash at once. It’s rarely played out that way for me, and most of the ways it has played out involve me getting my flesh pounded by an angry Flesh Pound.

Gentlemen

When it looked like Valve’s next Team Fortress 2 update would be the Spy’s unlockable weapons back in September last year, I said the prospect filled me with dread. Now that they’ve ambushed us with info on two of his new tools, and the whole thing is much more imminent that anyone realised, I am filled with a dark and terrible glee.

I’m not usually a fan of feigning death in multiplayer games, except as an entertaining way to fuck with ragdoll physics in Unreal Tournament 3. But the Dead Ringer dodges the two problems I usually have with fake-outs like this: 1) Trying to time your phony death to convincingly coincide with an enemy shot, which is fiddly at best and impossible with any degree of lag, and b) Having to shoot every damn corpse to make sure it’s not just pining for the fjords.

Here, the timing is automatic: when you’re holding it (presumably) the first hit you take appears to have killed you. And corpses are never going to get up: the uncertainty is just “Should he really have gone down that easily? Is he cloaked somewhere around here now?” It still might lead to a tedious amount of speculative firing, but we’ll see.

The Cloak and Dagger is more exciting to me. Being able to remain invisible indefinitely, staying still to recharge, suits my style: I’ve tired of sprinting to the front line and sap-spamming sentries or hoping I slip through a crossfire by sheer luck. My most interesting lives as a Spy have involved taking impractically long routes around and stalking the enemy team from deep within their base, seeing how long I can prey on them uncaught rather than how rapidly I can score. Currently this is only viable on certain maps, like Well, that have high alternative routes and gloomy corners to recharge in. I’m hoping Cloak and Dagger will let me be this much of a dick in every match.

It’s safe to assume that a) the Sniper update is still coming at the same time, b) these two are mutually exclusive alternatives to the conventional Cloak, and c) the Dead Ringer provides some immunity to being revealed by stray shots, or it might not be terribly useful.

Plants Vs Zombies: Lawns I Have Loved

Plants Vs Zombies is now out, and £7 on Steam. In it, you plant plants to stop zombies. It will enslave you like a delicious drug.

I’ve spent about forty hours of my life defending that little house from the undead through the craft of horticulture, and I liked it so much I’m actually quoted on that Steam page. Here are a few of the gardens I’ve landscaped in that time of which I happen to have screenshots on this machine.

Yes, this works. There’s a twist when you replay Plants Vs Zombies that encourages you to try stupid experiments like The Frozen Field Of Unending Spikeweeds here. The silvery ones are Spike-Rocks, secretly the most useful upgrade in the game, but for a reason that won’t be obvious at first.

Wedge formation! Largely pointless. But Kernel-paults are so brilliant – “There’s butter on my head” – and so cheap that you can afford to try ultra-reinforced meshes of Tallnuts and Chompers on these levels.

AAAAAAH! Man, you should have seen this place before Flag 24. It was a work of art. It was a machine. And yet, it was a lawn.

Now it is ate.

Truly, your garden has not known horror until you get to the mid-twenties in Survival: Endless. That, and the mini-game that lets you play as the zombies, are responsible for most of that horrific play-time figure I quoted earlier.

PvZ takes its time to get going, but the stream of new wonders throughout that time is steady and thick. Do not play it if there are things on this Earth you still hope to achieve.

A Different Idea For Ending BioShock

BioShock Spoilers

This is my idea, in ten steps, for how BioShock could have unfolded after your encounter with Andrew Ryan in his office. It was written in 2009, but coming back to it in 2020, I feel like I should clarify a couple of things at the top:

• Although I did vaguely try to limit myself to stuff that’s not too outlandish, I actually have no idea what it’s like to make a game of this kind so I don’t claim my version is practical in scope.
• It obviously comes from dissatisfactions with BioShock’s actual ending, but I’m not imagining those were down to a lack of ideas. I know games are made under unseen constraints, triple-A games triply so. It’s very easy to sit back and do armchair game design, and it’s also very fun, and you also can’t stop me, so here we are.

Continued

PC Gamer Podcast: PCs Vs Ponsoles

Haven’t had this much fun doing one of these in a while, so I hope the result is of amusement. I can finally talk about two exciting games I’ve been gagged about until now: Plants Vs Zombies and BioShock 2. We also try a new thing where we read out and answer questions from anyone on Twitter who cares to throw them at us, and we got a highly entertaining selection. And I do two impressions, one of which only Battleforge players will know is rubbish.

Our new issue on sale in the UK is our 200th special edition, which has, among its many items of note:

• My Star Trek Online preview – I’m suddenly hugely excited about this after seeing it played: they’re fulfilling my all-time geekiest fantasies, and that’s really saying something.
• Jim explaining how the massive Band of Brothers betrayal happened in EVE Online, and what it’s meant for the galaxy.
• My eight-page BioShock 2 preview, with an entire boxout about the ways in which your drill fist is like a penis. Some great quotes from two hours of interviews with the devs, all of whom took one dig or another at the original game.
• Kieron’s breakdown of the last 200 years of PC gaming, which features a picture of me as Adolf Hitler.
• My reviews of Plants Vs Zombies and Red Alert 3: Uprising. One is unbelievably good and the other is barely fun.

Trust Me With Your Ears: Volume Six

A regular feature in which I ask you to listen to a sound file with no idea what it’s going to be. Sometimes it’s voice, sometimes music, once it was just a noise. This one’s not super-obscure, but it’s ages since I actually listened to it, and to this day I find myself humming it when someone says the word ‘online’. It is dorky in the extreme.

Update! It’s not supposed to be all crackly and fucked up. But it’s sounding that way for some. See the comments for a link to the video.

Conversations With Strangers

Update! Some great conversations from the comments added to the bottom of this post (now with moar!)

Last night Waxy.org linked a service called Omegle, which instantly puts you in a one-on-one chat with an anonymous stranger. I tried it.

I said it “Supposedly” did this when I linked it on Twitter, because I thought it might be a bot coded to randomly insult people, as a joke on the stereotype that people on the internet are twats.

After three conversations, that was still my prevailing theory.

For my fourth, I decided to try and break the pattern by acting like an utter dick first.

You’re now chatting with a random stranger. Say hi!
You: I HATE YOU!
Stranger: my head hurts :'(
Stranger: don’t be rude i’m sensitive
You: I thought I’d try being the crazy one.
Stranger: thanks, asshole
You: Any… any time?
You: Maybe all the crazy people I talked to were trying the same thing.
Stranger: you’re an inconsiderate jerk
Stranger: what’s your favorite animal
You: This one: http://mfrost.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/2009/03/29/otter2.jpg
Stranger: why did you already have that link open and ready, you’re a fucking freeak.
Stranger: WTF
Stranger: THAT’S CUTE
Stranger: LOL

A pause.

You: Did that make your head any better?
Stranger: temporarily, yes
Stranger: thank you for your kind gestures………

I had to admit that it probably wasn’t a bot after all. Which suddenly made starting new conversations strangely compulsive.

Stranger: Jesus loves you
You: I’m just not that into him.
Your conversational partner has disconnected.

Stranger: z
You: zz
Your conversational partner has disconnected.

Stranger: o herd u liek
Stranger: consensual sex in the missionary position?
You: Yep.
Stranger: hm
Your conversational partner has disconnected.

You: Rah!
Stranger: hello stranger
You: Hello.
Stranger: male/female?
You: I like to start conversations the way I imagine godzilla would.
You: Male.
Stranger: excellent
You: The godzilla thing or the male thing?
Stranger: bothhhhhhhhhh
Your conversational partner has disconnected.

You: Hi. I reckon your favourite colour is blue.
Stranger: I reckon it aint.
You: Oh. What is it?
Stranger: My favorite colour is red
Stranger: yours?
You: Probably green.
Stranger: well that tells me alot about your personality.
You: Oh yeah? Red suggests to me that you’re an angry man.
Stranger: quite the contrary
Stranger: a passionate woman
You: I say.

Both Steve and Meteoracle shared shots of their conversations with wildly unhinged racists, and Steve inexplicably turned down an offer of sex with a robot. But one of my favourites was actually recounted to me by someone I was talking to on Omegle at the time:

You’re now chatting with a random stranger. Say hi!
Stranger: please don’t disconnect
Stranger: i love you

J-Man:

Amusingly I was talking to a 14 year old girl, and she asked if I was single. I said yes, and she told me it was because I talk to 14 year old girls on the internet.

You: Your appointment to FEMA should be finalized within the week. I’ve already discussed the matter with the Senator.
Stranger: hi!
Stranger: whut?
You: He didn’t really have a choice.
Stranger: who did’nt…
You: When I mentioned we could put him on the priority list for the Ambrosia vaccine, he was so willing it was almost pathetic
Stranger: you did’nt kill him did you?
You: Why contain it? Let it spill over the schools and churches, let the bodies pile up in the streets. In the end they’ll beg us to save them.
Stranger: Lets see… I’m actually kind in to that
You: They can smell their deaths, and the sound they’ll make rattling their cages will serve as a warning to the rest.
Stranger: i love it
You: The world left them behind long ago. We are the future.
Stranger: lets kill m all
You: Our biochem corpus is far in advance of theirs, as is our electronic sentience, and their… ‘ethical inflexibility’ has allowed us to make progress in areas they refuse to consider.
Stranger: true… true
You: But, I must admit, I’ve been somewhat disappointed with the performance of the primary unit.
Stranger: Well, mine is work. dont know about yours?
You: We’ve had to endure much, you and I, but soon there will be order again. A new age. Aquinas spoke of the mythical city on the hill, soon that city will be a reality and we will be crowned its kings. Or, better than kings… gods.
Stranger: I’m not sure if we should become what we want to be. The goverment is lying about the fact that they will support us. Who will tell?
You: All right. I get the picture. You want a piece of the pie, or you’re going to toss the whole pie out the window. Fair enough. You can have anything you want. How about Europe? Your own continent. Just let me complete my preparations.
Stranger: Go ahead. let my see
You: What an expensive mistake you turned out to be. I’ve ordered the troops to kill you, because quite frankly I don’t have the patience to wait for one of those damn killswitches to work.
Your conversational partner has disconnected.

EGTF

You’re now chatting with a random stranger. Say hi!
Stranger: oh its you! hows it been goin?
You: Oh my it’s you too!
You: Very well
You: How’ve things been since we last spoke?
Stranger: fag
Stranger: go die in a fire
Your conversational partner has disconnected.

Ush:

Connecting to server…
You’re now chatting with a random stranger. Say hi!
You: *guitar riff* hello
Stranger: *drum roll* FUCK YOU
You: *thousands of people shouting at once* Well thats not polite
Stranger: *people who care* What
You: *a dozen horses screaming in unison* i mean you could have said “hi”
Stranger: * A 1000 orphans crying * I’m Sorry let me start again HI
You: *wind-up monkeys clanging together* Thats better, see? not so hard to be civil
Stranger: *Loud noises* are you from a forum
You: *the laughter of children remixed* Oh no, nasty dirty places they are.
You: *cello solo in an empty hall* where are you from?
Stranger: * 200 african americans* they are nice places to meet new friends
Stranger: *400 cups of tea clanking* im from britain
You: *trumpets blaring* i am from a country quite close to britain
Stranger: *I have ran out of noises* france?
You: *coins hitting a marble floor from a height* nope!
You: *sheet metal being torn* To be honest Im not going to say.
Stranger: * strange gruntiing noises* sweeden
Stranger: * fecal matter hitting porcelain* why
You: *discordant flutes* nope! because I am a naturally paranoid person. whats it like out where you are?
Stranger: * children crying* awful but the weather is getting better
You: *The worlds largest fishbowl being tapped with a hollow iron bar* ’twas a lovely day here! I say, do you like tea?
Stranger: *N/A* No
You: *echoing footsteps* Thats a shame. There is a lot to be enjoyed with a good cup of tea.
You: *A heifer in heat* Take Earl Gray, for example.
Stranger: to be honest i have never had a full cup of tea
You: *Steam whistle* You really should try one you know. Take Earl Gray, for instance.
You: *The dark hum of space* Strong and refreshing like regular tea, but with a hint of lemon that affects your pallette in a completely different way…
Stranger: I see
Stranger: anyway i best be off chap
Your conversational partner has disconnected.

sQUEAKYfOAMpEANUT:

You: >Ye see before ye a SWAMP
You: >What wouldst thou do?
You: >
Stranger: FUCK YOUR MOTHER.
You: >You approach the fearsome FUCK YOUR MOTHER, brandishing your sword.
You: >The FUCK YOUR MOTHER attacks!
Stranger: SUCK MY DICK, FUCK YOUR MOTHER
You: >FIGHT >ITEMS >FLEE
Stranger: >FLEE
You: >You cannot escape! The FUCK YOUR MOTHER is far too large!
Stranger: >ITEMS
Stranger: >ITEMS
Stranger: >ITEMS
Stranger: >ITEMS
Stranger: >ITEMS
You: >You open up your SATCHEL to ruffle through your ITEMS. You have with you a BANANA, a MICK’S TAPE, and a SMALL ROCK. What woudst thou do?
Stranger: >use BANANA to FUCK YOUR MOTHER
You: >You throw your mighty BANANA at the fearsome FUCK YOUR MOTHER, who falls writhing to the ground in agony.
You: >You have defeated the FUCK YOUR MOTHER!
Stranger: FUCK YEAH!
You: >You gain three experience points, and the TOE OF THE FUCK YOUR MOTHER.
You: >Ye see before ye a SWAMP
Stranger: >QUIT
You: >NO ESCAPE
Stranger: oh shi-
You: >YOU SHALL PLAY FOREVER

Kadir:

You: go
Stranger: get
You: a
Stranger: great
You: big
Stranger: fucking
You: bunch
Stranger: of
You: pickles
Stranger: that
You: smell
Stranger: like
You: they
Stranger: were
You: about
Stranger: to
You: go
Stranger: have
You: a
Stranger: flight
You: of
Stranger: greatness
You: to
Stranger: alpha
You: centari
Stranger: to
You: find
Stranger: ender
You: and
Stranger: his
You: huge
Stranger: influential
You: admired
Stranger: sister
You: who
Stranger: wrote
You: about
Stranger: the
You: war
Stranger: let’s stop right now and agree we need to be friends, okay??

How To Stop Writing A Fucking Book

Brief out-of-context quote from Blizzard honcho Jeff Kaplan that made Stardock’s Trent Polack – and me – smile:

Every time someone says something like that, I picture a scripted scene playing out some dramatic event that would otherwise have been communicated in text. But of course, that’s not games. That’s films and plays, which Kaplan rightly cites as other things to avoid imitating – games suck at it. Half-Life 2 is remarkable for coming closest, and I remember getting very carried away about its animation at the time, but the truth is Alyx’s ridiculous canned gesticulations would be scoffable in any film.

Mechanics are the main thing “uniquely video game”: this is the only medium where we can learn about something by experimenting with it, toying with it, seeing how it responds to different inputs. But can you tell a story with that? Art game loons like Rohrer certainly seem to suggest story-like themes with their game mechanics. But those same games set out not to tell any particular story, and the zero-writing approach means they’d struggle to anyway.

The cool thing about games is that books can’t show you exactly how a scene looks, and films can’t ask you to read a huge chunk of background text, and music can’t respond to you. We’re absolutely a mish-mash medium, and perhaps “uniquely video game” doesn’t have to mean pulling one magical trick that nothing else can do. Perhaps it means leveraging all the other mediums games comprise, rather than leaning heavily on any one: whether that’s books in World of Warcraft or movies in Gears of War.

The one game that springs to mind as an exemplary case of telling a story in a way no other medium could is my old favourite Masq. It has text and pictures, but not much of either one: it’s simple-looking, simply written and short. But it offers two uniquely video game experiences.

The first time through, it’s a story that responds to you. It’s only multiple choice, but the choices are extremely multiple, and you genuinely do drive the story to an extent I’ve seen nowhere else. (Though I’m sure plenty of text adventures and simple graphic adventures like this compare favourably).

The second occurs after you’ve played it a few times, and you’re really just experimenting. You get to know the characters in a way linear fiction can’t allow: you get to ask, “What would they have done if…” Dozens and dozens of times. It wouldn’t be remarkable, except that there are fascinating quirks to some of Masq’s characters that only become clear when you know them from multiple playthroughs.

Masq can do this because its content – pictures and dialogue for the various eventualities and decisions – is cheap to make. A decision with four possible outcomes doesn’t take impractically long to flesh out. If Blizzard want to tell their story in a uniquely video game way, they have to swallow a bitter pill: the notion that any given player isn’t likely to see most of what they spend their time on. But after filling a world the size of Azeroth with quests, that’s a pill they’ve swallowed in handfuls.

Chris Livingston’s Merchants Of Brooklyn Movie Script

I appreciate that many of you must already read his blog, but a) this is too good to go unlinked, and b) I never formally nodded to Chris’s excellent relaunch as First-Person Shouter, aborting one idea – itself the blog to accompany another aborted idea – to revive yet another aborted idea: a general games blog. Soft contrast designs with harmonious palettes, liberal use of colourful images and strictly logical layouts make my eyes happy.

Merchants of Brooklyn is an ultra-violent CryEngine 2 game about not so much Merchants as cavemen. Chris has not played or seen it, which makes his screenplay adaptation – Cloned Cavemen of Future Brooklyn: The Movie – all the sweeter. Let’s play a clip:

Lord I Just Don’t Care

I’ve been wondering when and how best to post something of Florence and the Machine‘s for a while, pretty much since I first heard them on Adam & Joe. I didn’t doubt it would be Dog Days, the exhaustingly energetic rollercoaster of a song I heard first, I was just waiting till they had something out for it to promote. I forgot that what they released could theoretically be better. They still don’t have an album, but this is Dog’s B-side: You’ve Got The Love. Continued